Aren't Rust programs still considerably larger than their C equivalent because everything is statically linked? It's kind of hard to see that as an advantage.
But in practice it's more like there's an overhead for "hello world" but it's a fixed overhead. So it's really only a problem where you have lots of binaries, e.g. for coreutils. The solution there is a multi-call binary like Busybox that switches on argv[0].
C programs often seem small because you don't see the size of their dependencies directly, but they obviously still take up disk space. In some cases they can be shared but actually the amount of disk space this saves is not very big except for things like libc (which Rust dynamically links) and maybe big libraries like Qt, GTK, X11.
Yes, all Rust libraries depended on are statically compiled into the final binary. One one hand, it makes binary size much larger, on the other, it makes it much easier to build an application that will "just work" without too much fuss.
In my personal projects with Rust, this ends up being very nice because it makes packaging easier. However, I've never been in a situation where binary size matters like in the embedded space, for example.
Rust isn't the only language with this approach, Go is another.
Static compilation and static linking are two separate things - however, Rust is both statically compiled and (usually) uses static linking of dependency libraries.
